Crossing the Rubicon of Middle Age

This is one of my la-la-la posts.  It won't be peppered with anger about racism or shitty public education.  Or marriage and taxes.  All that is the background noise of life today.  (My NSA listener must be bored to death.  It's not like 2005 when in the middle of a phone conversation with a friend I'd gratuitously burp Fuck Bush and then continue with my conversation.)  What I wanted to mention is that for the first time in my life since I started to garden I hired someone to do some of the work.  The simple fact that somebody else's arms and shoulders were digging holes and turning soil and pulling bushes out by the roots seemed to inspire me.  I realized then as I watched J. work in the rain that the dread of going down on my knees was keeping me from turning the front yard (my patch) into a grass-free oasis instead of the weed factory farm it has been since the snow melted.

You may think that you are 30 but your knees and hips will tell you otherwise.  Now if I want certain kinds of physical work done I'll have to pay for it; either in cash or aching muscles.  Now that I think about it did Michaelangelo get winched up to the Sistine Chapel ceiling every morning after a mint latté?  Don't think so.

Saturday Poetry: The Big Blonde

from Turn Left at the Dead Dog:

There are dreams

that belong to you

long before you know what to do with them.

You are memory’s steward

so that when

a dream comes, it is

as the comics say

déja vu all over again.

It’s not the first time since childhood

she’s been on my mind

The big blonde, sheathed in black

singing into the studio microphone

back when

Jazz was a thing supreme.

Remote then, behind the glass

not to be touched, a porcelain doll

Inviolate.

Now she greets me at the Shipyard’s gate.

My head bows as sunlight bursts off her platinum hair.

I just know behind the tortoiseshell frames

there are sapphires glistening on her face.

Then she smiles at me

Teeth couched in fuchsia lips.

For me time stops.

I am awake.

I Was Sposed to Keep My Mouth Shut

I still have rules.  Not many, particularly not many that I haven't broken exposing myself as a Liar and A Hypocrite (as well as a Gentleman and a Scholar), but some nevertheless.  For instance, I never drink alcohol before 11 am.  Kept that one.  So far.

As part of a promising initiative to change the way we live now, Long Wharf Theatre and the New Haven Public Library have launched Community Conversations to discuss race and gentrification in New Haven.  Using Bruce Norris' "Clybourne Park" they've held Conversations hosted by Colin Caplan, Tom Ficklin and Clifton Graves at  different branch libraries with each site's meeting having a particular tenor.

 I attended the first one at the Stetson branch (in Newhallville) and wound up not only quoted in the Independent but photographed, too.  After that I said, if you go to another Conversation, you are Not To Say One Word other than hello.  Because, y'know, nobody likes a yaktivist, (my new favorite portmanteau), a person who talks incessantly about injustice and social change but does very little in terms of action.

I decided to go to the Fair Haven discussion last Saturday.  While the Dixwell meeting felt like a reunion of many of Newhallville's African-American families, Fair Haven's was a more astringent gathering in part because of the fascinating mix of people who live there and because there were no small number of folks who knew a lot about the history of US residential segregation thanks to legislative and judicial policy hand-in-hand with the standing practices of the banking and real estate industries. 

When it comes to talking about Race in this country when we get together in these rooms we are Very Polite.  And trust me when I tell you that I was trying, I really was trying to follow the rules of the game not to mention my own which was to come to Listen not talk.  But somebody said something and before you know it I had opened my mouth on the way to losing my shit.  Bam!! All she said was that her own daughters now lived in Brooklyn (I'm guessing Bushwick or East New York) but that when she was a student in the 80's she, as a young white girl from Connecticut country, she wouldn't dream of living in those places ....

And I shot back (and I'm paraphrasing here) that this is what gets to me in these discussions, that the normative perspective is supposed to be how white people see things and that even though all of those places (Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, East New York, Bushwick) are full of complex communities that talk of specific neighborhoods in New York being dangerous for "me" is so reductive generally because it's based on ignorance and to use a fashionable phrase, white privilege, that it makes me crazy.  Now, this woman doesn't know me and it would be easy to think that I'd just become the "Lena" from the play her employer had produced.  It would be too easy to think that yet another Angry Black Woman doing what we do.  (Her:  Sheesh, I just speak my mind and a black person bites my head off.)  She certainly doesn't know that if a black person had started talking about not going into Greenwich to shop because blah-de-blah-de-blah I would light into their asses, too.

When the Conversation was officially over both she and I made it a point to approach one another and shake hands.  She wanted to finish her point about being a small town white girl from Connecticut and not being safe in the city.  But, again, I cut her off.  Well, yeah, I said (and again I paraphrase) you'd have to have some street smarts but frankly a white girl is more safe in a black neighborhood in a way a black person wouldn't be in a white neighborhood.  A fact and I'm not even angry about it.

Or am I?